Dev Watercooler – Stat Updates for Warlords of Draenor

Latest update: Our Guide to Item Changes in Warlords of Draenor is now updated.Blizzard has a new Dev Watercooler today covering Warlords of Draenor secondary and minor stats--Versatility is a new secondary stat that upgrades your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. Readiness, a planned secondary stat, is gone.

As there are significant item changes in Warlords of Draenor, we made a guide a few weeks ago explaining all of these changes and how you can use Wowhead to see your new stats for gear, enchants, and gems.

You can also see how your character is affected by the stat changes and item squish with the Warlords Profiler.

Just go to http://wod.wowhead.com/list and enter your character's name and realm on the left-hand side for "Lookup Battle.net Profile."

It will display your gear that has changed stats, as well as post-squish values for gear, gems, and enchants. (Sample Profiler comparison: my character on the live profiler vs Warlords.)

You can also browse individual items in the Warlords database and quickly switch between live and Warlords via the option at the top left of the screen.

Secondary stats for armor remain unchanged when switching between specs. This means that if you really want different combinations of secondary stats for each spec, you need multiple items for each slot.

Secondary stats on armor are critical strike, mastery, and haste, as well as two new stats:Versatility: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%.

Multistrike: Grants two chances for your damage and healing effects to fire an additional time, each at 30% effectiveness

Hit, expertise, dodge, and parry are secondary stats that are removed--armor with these stats will be converted to critical strike, mastery, and haste.Earlier in Warlords development, Readiness and Amplify were planned as secondary stats, but they were scrapped.

When referring to "Non-Armor," Blizzard is describing the following gear slots: Neck, Back, Rings, Trinkets, and Weapons.Secondary stats on non-armor include all the stats described above, as well as the following:

Bonus Armor is only found on tank-appropriate Non-Armor pieces. This increases the tank's armor. Non-armor pieces that formerly had Dodge or Parry now have Bonus Armor.

Spirit is now a secondary stat and is only found on healing pieces.

In addition, there is a new type of stat--Tertiary/Minor. These stats have a small chance to be found on gear as an augmentation.

Movement Speed: Increases your movement speed

Indestructible: Causes the item to not take durability damage

Leech: Causes you to be healed for a portion of all damage and healing done

Avoidance: Reduces your damage taken from area-of-effect attacks.

In this Dev Watercooler, we’d like to give an update on secondary and minor stats in Warlords of Draenor. A lot has changed since we first revealed our plans at BlizzCon, so this blog will not only cover the latest developments related to what we’ve already discussed, but also go into detail on some new changes we’ve got in the pipe.

Secondary Stats

As we announced at BlizzCon, we’re retiring Hit, Expertise, Dodge, and Parry. Hit and Expertise weren’t really providing very interesting gameplay, and Dodge and Parry are being replaced with Bonus Armor. Check out the Patch Notes for further discussion on why we removed these stats.

The other secondary stats—Crit, Mastery, Haste, and Spirit—work well and will be sticking around. One important note is that Spirit will only appear on items for specific slots (fingers, neck, back, and trinkets) and will give a much stronger benefit than it does today. Healers will prefer items with Spirit for those slots, but otherwise will use similar gear to everyone else.

New Stat: MultistrikeA new stat in Warlords of Draenor, Multistrike grants your spells, abilities, and auto-attacks additional chances to activate. If you’ve been following along since BlizzCon, you may remember that in our early plans, your Multistrike chance would split between two rolls and effectively have a 200% cap. We’ve since changed that to make it more clear and intuitive: the full chance is given to both rolls, with a 100% cap.

Now Multistrike grants your spells, abilities, and auto-attacks the chance to activate up to two extra times at 30% of normal effectiveness. For example, if you have 55% Multistrike and cast a Fireball that does 1000–1100 damage, you’ll have two separate 55% chances to automatically follow with another smaller Fireball that does 300–330 damage. That means every time you cast Fireball, you have a chance to see one big-damage Fireball, and then two smaller-damage Fireballs leave your hands in quick succession.

New Stat: Bonus Armor
Throughout the game’s history, some items have had bonus armor on them, which made them more attractive to tanks. After we removed Dodge and Parry, we wanted to replace these stats with a new tank-specific stat, and Bonus Armor fit the bill nicely. As with Spirit, it’ll only show up on rings, necklaces, cloaks, and trinkets. It’s clearly valuable to all tanks, and will be tuned to be much stronger than other secondary stats. Tanks will want to use items with Bonus Armor for those slots.

Retiring Stat: Amplify

We tried out Amplify on trinkets in Siege of Orgrimmar, and at BlizzCon we announced that it’d be a stat in Warlords of Draenor. The intent of Amplify was to multiply the effects of your other secondary stats. However, as we continued development, we found that Amplify had some design problems. In particular, we determined that it would quickly become the absolute best stat for everyone. On top of that, even if we were to apply heavy diminishing returns, the stat still wouldn’t have an interesting effect on your gameplay. For those reasons, it’s no longer going to be a stat in Warlords of Draenor.

Retiring Stat: Readiness

Readiness was another stat that we tried out on Siege of Orgrimmar trinkets. This one looked solid at first. Cooldown reduction is a great concept, the idea was well received, and although there were some balance issues, they seemed solvable. However, as we continued development, we hit a snag. Readiness works great in small quantities on the scale of a trinket or two, like in Siege of Orgrimmar. However, when we expand that to a point where you could potentially have Readiness on all of your character’s gear, problems arise.

Using a damage-dealing (DPS) class as an example, most of the stat’s value comes in letting you use your temporary burst-damage cooldowns (Arcane Power, Vendetta, Recklessness, Dark Soul, etc.) more often. Most of those cooldowns increase damage by 20%–30% while active, which is substantial for a temporary burst ability, but doesn’t compare well against secondary stats. If you stack a lot of Crit and can reach 30% Crit from gear, that’s more or less a 30% passive increase to damage. If secondary stats are equal, you should be able to stack Readiness instead, and get a damage increase that’s similar (or at least close). But how do we give you a 30% damage increase from letting you use a +20% damage cooldown more often? And once you get to 100% uptime, then what?

We experimented with many potential design changes but never found a version of Readiness that really felt good, so we’re going to shelve it for now, at least as a common secondary stat. You may still see it pop up occasionally in small quantities, such as on a trinket.

New Stat: Versatility

The removal of Readiness left some space in our itemization plans and room for another stat to take its place. It’s important to offer players plenty of different secondary stats so that you have a wide variety of interesting and compelling gear to choose from. To that end, we’ve been working on a new secondary stat called Versatility. Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example. We won’t be tuning it to be anyone’s highest throughput secondary stat, but it’ll be close, and it’ll give you a nice boost to how versatile your character is in the process. It’ll be especially attractive to hybrids who want to feel more “hybridy.”

Minor Stats

Most gear that drops in Warlords of Draenor has a chance to have a random bonus in addition to its normal stats. We call these “minor stats,” and they provide a small but useful bonus to your character.

New Minor Stat: Movement SpeedThe first of our minor stats is Movement Speed, which, as you can probably guess, increases the speed that you move by a small amount. Previously, movement speed increases came from enchants and various class abilities, but otherwise never directly came from gear. The Movement Speed minor stat will stack with all other sources of movement speed, but we’ll be keeping the maximum benefit you can get from it fairly low—we want it to feel like a fun bonus when you get it, but not a large increase to character power.

New Minor Stat: AvoidanceAnother minor stat, Avoidance, has previously only ever been used for a few prominent class pets. It reduces the damage you take from area-of-effect (AoE) attacks, though compared to the pet version, the Avoidance minor stat will come in much smaller quantities. The goal is to soften the blow of AoE attacks a bit, but not allow you to just stand in the fire.

New Minor Stat: Indestructible (previously Sturdiness)We called this one Sturdiness when we announced it at BlizzCon, and its original effect reduced durability damage that you take by a small amount across your whole character. Since then, we’ve renamed it Indestructible, and changed it to cause that specific item to not take any durability damage. We think the change will make the stat more intuitive while providing a similar overall benefit.

New Minor Stat: Leech (previously Lifesteel)Lifesteal is another minor stat that has been renamed and slightly redesigned since BlizzCon. Our original plan was for it to convert a percentage of your damage done to self-healing. We’ve extended it to work for healers as well, causing an extra percentage of all of the healing you do to heal you as well. With that change, the name was no longer fitting, so we’re renaming it Leech.

Proposed Minor Stat: CleaveWe announced Cleave as a minor stat at BlizzCon, but have since run into some problems with it. Most importantly, it was of situational value to DPS classes, always valuable to healers, and had very little value to tanks. As a result, we were concerned it would cause items that would otherwise be equally appropriate for a healer and a DPS class to be viewed as “healer gear,” which isn’t our intent. We’ve shelved it for now, though we have some ideas about how it might show up occasionally in specific cases.

The Complete List
In summary, here’s a complete list of our planned secondary and minor stats in Warlords of Draenor:

As you can see, we have a lot of exciting changes and additions in the works designed to give you a variety of intuitive and interesting gearing options. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how these are playing out in our alpha and beta testing, and we’ll continue to refine and adjust as needed. As always, we look forward to hearing your constructive feedback!

In addition, there is a new type of stat--Tertiary/Minor. These stats have a small chance to be found on gear as an augmentation (see section below). Different tertiary stats many be limited to certain gear slots, based on the data.

The gear slots per stat seems to have been removed from the article, though. Since it was "datamined, rather than confirmed," there may not have been enough of a sample set to make a determination.

I'd hate to see the angst, though, if someone gets the "warforged" (bonus iLvl), a gem slot, and... the wrong tertiary stat. :-) It's already approximately 0.1% to get gear with warforged, gem slot, and ANY tertiary, if we have to have the specific tertiary, that means probably 0.025% chance... (Numbers based on assuming 10% chance for bonuses.)

Comment by Lupin3rd

on 2014-06-04T10:56:10-05:00

Uhm, versatily...a bit weird name...oh, and just another thing...if an item has spirit is for healer, if it has bonus armor itis for tank, if anything else is it for dps? i am talking about ring/neck/cloack/trinket

edit: Typo

PS: i am trying to read the page on a netbook 10.1" but the part that start with :Originally posted by Blizzard (Official Post | Blue Tracker)Collapse

is cut on the right side and i can't read it..

Comment by korseki

on 2014-06-04T11:29:24-05:00

Most likely. As they mentioned the stats will swap based on your spec so I assume that if you change from a dps to tank spec (eg. Fury to Prot) you'll get armor on your cloaks / trinkets / rings / necklaces, and dps to healer spec (Shadow to Holy) you get Spirit on those slots.

Comment by PragmaticSoul

on 2014-06-04T11:53:57-05:00

Most likely. As they mentioned the stats will swap based on your spec so I assume that if you change from a dps to tank spec (eg. Fury to Prot) you'll get armor on your cloaks / trinkets / rings / necklaces, and dps to healer spec (Shadow to Holy) you get Spirit on those slots.

Comment by Cowboydupbap

on 2014-06-04T12:20:47-05:00

Yeah they said Tanks and Healers will still need two sets(non-armor) which sucks in my mind.. getting double gear is easier than ever but hybrids are just not as good as pure dps classes and deserve to have an edge not be punished.

Comment by felhunter

on 2014-06-04T12:21:39-05:00

readiness is being shelved, well that is hardly suprising.

it was quite obvious that the amount of readiness gained would either end up being too high or far too low it being interresting.

Versatility is a bit weird named, atleast if it does what they say it will do.atleast i wouldn't call being able to do 1% more damage/healing/damage reduc as versatile.suspose it's versatile in the way how it ends up being many different aspects of your character.but naming it: Empower, would seem a lot more fitting in my eyes.

Comment by Cowboydupbap

on 2014-06-04T12:32:38-05:00

Yeah they said Tanks and Healers will still need two sets(non-armor) which sucks in my mind.. getting double gear is easier than ever but hybrids are just not as good as pure dps classes and deserve to have an edge not be punished.

Leech will stack up with dps.. I'm not sure how they're gonna get around that.. (unless they change it so that it's actually a fixed number and not a % value of dps. But even then it will still stack with haste.) Indestructible just saves you a little gold for repairs.. Tanks are gonna want Bonus armor, Versatility, Leech on everything possible.

Comment by Rankkor

on 2014-06-04T12:43:45-05:00

I'd hate to see the angst, though, if someone gets the "warforged" (bonus iLvl), a gem slot, and... the wrong tertiary stat. :-) It's already approximately 0.1% to get gear with warforged, gem slot, and ANY tertiary, if we have to have the specific tertiary, that means probably 0.025% chance... (Numbers based on assuming 10% chance for bonuses.)

o_O

Can you define "wrong"?

Because none of the tertiary stats are particularly that game-changing. None of them increase your DPS, they just provide mild utility, either in a minor speed boost, a small heal that in no way could possibly replace a healer, a small reduction in AoE damage, or a slight decrease in repair bills.

None of them is useless, none of them is particularly great either. So how on earth could someone get the "wrong" tertiary?

Comment by PragmaticSoul

on 2014-06-04T13:04:51-05:00

Can you define "wrong"?

"Wrong", definition: Whatever tertiary stats that weren't what the player is trying to stack.

In other words, a player gets a Speed piece, but they're trying to stack Avoidance, then the stat is "wrong."

Entirely subjective. But the top 0.1% of players DO care about these things. (Me, I'd be tickled if an item of mine gets warforged, a gem slot, OR a tertiary stat; getting all three would be mind-boggling, and I wouldn't care WHICH tertiary stat it was...).

Comment by Interest

on 2014-06-04T14:30:00-05:00

Versatility: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%.

Hells yes. I imagine it would be rather hard to stack this stat compared to other secondaries (as in it probably requires more Versatility to gain 1%/it's weighed lower than the other secondaries on purpose).

Leech: Causes you to be healed for a portion of all damage and healing done

Om nom nom. I love sustain.

Also, Cleave seems eh (I mean I don't like Area Damage in Diablo 3 so I'm biased against Cleave because reasons such as impractical vs. single target, which is definitely more of a thing in WoW than D3) and I'm sad to see Readiness go.

Comment by Alasdaer

on 2014-06-04T15:07:21-05:00

I don't get it. They ditched Cleave because to much heal power and items with it will become healer items which they don't want to see. But they're putting armor on non-armor pieces for tanks and spirit on non-armor for healer. That's clearly labeling items for certain specs. Contradictory, isn't it?

Unless ofc a necklace is just that: a necklace. I switch to tank it gains +armor. I switch to healer it gains +spirit.

Comment by darquis

on 2014-06-04T16:47:33-05:00

The way I understood amplify it was meant to, well, amplify certain stats.

It seems like versatility is just a spin on that concept with different stats effected.

Comment by grodon909

on 2014-06-04T22:33:58-05:00

Readiness did seem troublesome, even without reforging available. My rogue is only ~530, but with the "readiness" trinket, the start of a lot of many fights allow me to use Killing Spree, Shadow Blades+Adrenaline Rush, then another Killing Spree (and being able to do it again like 30 seconds later). I imagine that a lucky combat rogue would have been able to get enough gear to keep his "burst" abilities rolling quite a lot of the time. I still love it, but it is a problem.

PvP will be interesting: I imagine that leech and Versatility could be abused. Speaking of which, my druid will probably try to stack versatility for funzies.

Comment by wrongheaded

on 2014-06-05T05:45:24-05:00

I'm sorry, but this new gear paradigm sounds horrible.

First of all, all gear should behave identically - either it all switches with your spec, or none of it does. Maybe if they want to make weapons separate because you can't make a pally's 2-hander into two separate items (1H and shield) when they go prot, fine. But this? This is messy, and needlessly so.

Second, now instead of reforging when switching specs, we'll need to get a whole new set of non-armor gear. Right now you can use reforging to help close the gap when you switch specs, but in WoD it will just be "this gear has the wrong secondary stats for my new spec, now I need to grind for new pieces."

Finally, the randomness of tertiary stats is just a bad, bad idea. Because as much as people complain about welfare epics and similarly foolish complaints, WoW has never been the loot pinata that Diablo is. If you could get the best gear in the game from solo play, sure, go nuts with the random tertiary madness because it's up to you how much you want to grind. But you can only do so much progression raiding per week, and getting constantly denied is going to wear on people. Plus now we're going to have players who don't want to let go of last tier's gear because it has those tertiaries they've grown used to and will notice when they go missing (e.g. speed, leech, avoidance).

On the whole I'm looking forward to WoD, but this and the fact that they're removing flavor (non-rotation) class abilities are making me less enthusiastic.

Comment by strayth

on 2014-06-05T10:57:33-05:00

First of all, all gear should behave identically - either it all switches with your spec, or none of it does.

Second, now instead of reforging when switching specs, we'll need to get a whole new set of non-armor gear. Right now you can use reforging to help close the gap when you switch specs, but in WoD it will just be "this gear has the wrong secondary stats for my new spec, now I need to grind for new pieces."

Finally, the randomness of tertiary stats is just a bad, bad idea.

I agree with the above. These changes are fraught with half-measures that come off as unintuitive and probably won't achieve any of the originally designated goals. Design By Committee rings true here.

If they want to (at long last) allow us to swap specs without swapping gear, they should make that happen. "Now you only have to swap some of your gear!" isn't progress. It's baffling to watch them deliver only half a pizza.

I'm impartial to the stats they shelved; and versatility still sounds cool. Same with leech. I'm calling it now though; Indestructible will be widely considered the least useful tertiary. Its only use would be to misers who farm their waking hours away, but who haven't calculated the amount of savings from less time traveled. It's the new "of the Wolf".

Comment by zanatorix

on 2014-06-05T11:12:57-05:00

Yeah they said Tanks and Healers will still need two sets(non-armor) which sucks in my mind.. getting double gear is easier than ever but hybrids are just not as good as pure dps classes and deserve to have an edge not be punished.

Sounds like you're talking about normal role swapping, not the role of a hybrid.A class that can heal as one spec and switch to another spec to tank / dps isn't a hybrid class, a hybrid is something that can do moderate amounts of healing and dps as a single spec.As a main dps hybrid you wouldn't want spirit on your accessories over a stat that would be useful to your "primary" role ( even if a dps version of spirit / bonus armour hasn't been announced)

We aren't being punished by not having an interchangeable bonus stat on our dps accessories.. instead we're being buffed in our other spec due to the fact we don't need two sets of gear with different primary stats.

Comment by zanatorix

on 2014-06-05T11:17:46-05:00

PvP will be interesting: I imagine that leech and Versatility could be abused. Speaking of which, my druid will probably try to stack versatility for funzies.

If boomkin and feral healing is as broken as it has been in MoP, versatility won't make that much of a difference

Comment by LilRichard

on 2014-06-07T23:19:50-05:00

A class that can heal as one spec and switch to another spec to tank / dps isn't a hybrid class, a hybrid is something that can do moderate amounts of healing and dps as a single spec.

That's it! A dps-only character (eg, a rogue, or a moon/feral druid) will only need one set of gear. The same goes for characters who will be fulfilling a tank- or healer-only role. Anyone who has wanted the luxury of being able to optimally perform either of two roles (via dual-speccing) at will up until now has needed a full set of gear for each spec. Come WoD, the need for up to 16 more pieces of gear to do that will drop to 6 (or maybe even zero, if spirit & bonus armour don't come at the cost of other stats)!

What's more, all 6 of those items used (neck, cloak, trinkets, rings) will be useful for ANY spec - eg, for a tank to have a ring without bonus armour will be the equivalent of having at most a fraction of an average ilvl off its actual average ilvl in its other role. Today, for a tank to have "the wrong ring" means having maybe -30 to average ilvl.

Blizzard isn't punishing hybrids, they're making it easier to enable characters to dual-spec. Why do people complain about this?

Editing: Reducing convolution.

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